The application of Social Media – especially in Healthcare – may seem to be a relatively simple matter.

But it isn’t.

Look around at the times were in: we have different generations aiming to use social media – and they all are looking at the world through different lenses, angles, contexts. The 50-year old social media guru makes assumptions about those inexperienced millennials. Those inexperienced millennials make assumptions about that 50-year old who thinks she’s a genius because she was on Twitter before them. (It all smells like teen spirit these days.)

Here’s the reality – few things worthy of doing well are easy to do.

Mapping out visions, developing strategies, organizing tactics, executing every single day in the face of questionable return, undying change, and conflicting political dynamics – these are not categories that easily dovetail.

So while executives and managers in Healthcare who fell into a worm-hole in 1991 may be finally figuring out what “that @ thing on *the* Twitter” is, the chances of any one organization to succeed on a day-to-day, week-to-week, year-to-year basis is low. Sorry – but it’s just true.

Expectations-setting is a critical part of achieving good Healthcare outcomes.

Right now, the Healthcare industry is being sold very high expectations *and* being told it’s “not all that hard”.

But it is. Anybody who has been involved in running Enterprise-level social media knows that it is. We know how ideas get killed, how poor internal communications demolish productivity, how frustrating it is to get consensus on even the simplest problems, etc.

Here’s the good news: You don’t have to waste your time. You do have other choices. You do have values to offer – if doing social media won’t come easy, do you think it will make your core values any better? If it takes your best communications personnel more than 15 minutes to write 3 short paragraphs on a known topic…well, let’s just say you’ve just failed a critical litmus test*.

The claim that you will be left behind because you don’t use social media is baseless mimicry of Silicon Valley babble.

It’s not that these media don’t have roles to play.

It’s just that once you start playing, you better know your game.

Like the back of your hand.

Disappointed? Don’t worry – 1991 wasn’t a bad year to get stuck in a worm-hole.